LG Electronics’ TVs have reportedly become the ultimate spy gadgets. According to a video expose by Gamers Nexus, most LG smart TVs continuously spy on their owners in extremely invasive ways, such as scanning local networks to map connected smartphones and other devices, even when they’re switched off and disconnected
In a video posted on YouTube titled “216,000,000 Spy TVs,” Gamers Nexus said it tested a number of U.S. retail LG OLED TVs, including last year’s flagship model, the LG G5. It used Wireshark to capture the TV’s network packets, which revealed that it’s continuously and actively scanning the local area network for unrelated hardware, including smartphones and smart watches. It also collects the TV owner’s IP addresses, and details of the names and signal strengths of nearby Wi-Fi networks, plus location data.
All of this is then fed into LG Ad Solutions, which is the company’s targeted ad business, and it’s here that the scale of this surveillance operation becomes clear. While LG claims to have around 216 smart TVs operating globally, the ad division claims to be able to access 363 million secondary addressable devices in the U.S. alone, simply by monitoring other hardware that uses the same network as its TVs.
In addition, LG’s TVs also use Automated Content Recognition technology, which samples on-screen video and audio and transforms this into a log of what individual users are watching. ACR is a controversial technology that has attracted negative press in the past, but Gamers Nexus claims that LG goes much further with its surveillance operations.
For instance, during bench tests, it found that LG’s smart TVs were able to capture crystal clear microphone audio from the occupants of the home, even when the TV was put into standby mode. You might think that disconnecting the TV from the internet would fix this, but alas, LG simply stores the voice input data locally and waits for web access to be restored, before uploading it all back home.
If that wasn’t creepy enough, Gamers Nexus also published several clips of LG Executives making comments like “we own the glass,” or “we own the TV.” The comments are essentially a pitch to advertisers – the company says it can provide marketers with the full picture of everything someone does with their TVs, and also help them target other devices. “Within an LG household, we can help extend [an advertising] campaign footprint to the other devices in the household,” one executive said.
LG has been involved in this kind of furore before. Just over a month ago, the company was accused of installing adware on some consumer’s PCs via its monitors, and also recording the voices of visitors in their homes. LG officially refuted these claims, but as TechRadar reported, that rebuttal seems rather limp when considering one executive’s claim that “we know who’s in the LG household, we know which devices are there, we know what you’re exposed to on TV and we know how to extend that reach into mobile.”
The full Gamers Nexus video, which is more than two hours long, can be seen here, but the main claim is that LG’s TV advertising surveillance operation is extremely intrusive, going much further than most consumers realise:
However, it’s at this point we should make it clear that LG probably isn’t alone in doing this. At the end of the video, Gamers Nexus states that it’s “certain” that other TV brands are doing much the same thing. Certainly, few would be surprised if that is the case. After all, while the practice is certainly very creepy, this is increasingly how TV manufacturers make their money these days.
We should further point out that Gamers Nexus only looked at what LG’s TVs are doing in the U.S. It’s unclear if its surveillance operation goes to the same extent in the U.K. and Europe, where consumers have the protection of laws like the GDPR.
The reality is that the TV industry currently operates on razor-thin margins, with some brands even selling their TVs at break-even. Instead of making money on the TV sale, they instead rely on advertising to bring in recurring revenue. It’s notable that TVs are basically the only kind of consumer gadget that hasn’t seen steep price increased due to the AI industry’s “RAMageddon”.
Nonetheless, people on Reddit were outraged by Nexus Gamer’s findings. On the r/gadgets subreddit, a user called grahag wrote that “every appliance in my house is an LG… I will never buy an LG product again.”
Another user, called BirnirG, expressed similar sentiments: “I hope nobody buys their products after this… If I buy your product I own it, they don’t ‘own the glass’ or anything any more.”
While all of this is legal and above board, the reality is that few people are aware of the extent that TV manufacturers are going to in order to collect valuable advertising data. Such practices are generally only disclosed in the terms and conditions or privacy policies that barely anyone reads. And these policies are regularly updated so that these companies can implement even more invasive data collection methods.
There is a solution of sorts. Nexus Gamers says you can always unplug your LG TV from the internet, and instead use a streaming stick or set-top box for streaming. However, doing this will almost certainly mean that your data just ends up going to someone else. That is, unless you by an Apple TV 4K box.
